5 things I gained from learning to dance salsa On2

The more styles of salsa you can dance…the bigger the pool of people you are able to dance with …which means the more time you will spend dancing… Simples!

Deep down I think that’s what most followers want – to be in constant demand on the social dance floor.

So I considered learning to dance on 2 as the last piece in my holy trinity of salsa dancing. I was already trained in Cuban and cross body on 1 salsa so adding ‘on 2 salsa’ into my dance repertoire meant I could actually dance with anyone, in any style, anywhere in the world.

That’s pretty amazing in my book!

“I know where the 1 is – how hard can it be to find the 2”? The answer is… not at all hard for some people and very hard for others!

After you have danced in a particular way for so long it becomes habitual and part of your muscle memory. Even if you train your ear to listen to a different beat it can still take a while for your body catch up! Typical teething problems for leads can be the feet managing to dance on 2 but the arms still leading on 1 – makes for an interesting experience! As a follower, exiting spins on the correct beat was what I personally found hardest.

For me the answer was to get deeper into the music so that my body was more likely to feel and join in with what I was hearing. Through dancing on 2 I learnt how to better appreciate all the different layers in the music and what instruments would guide me best to dance on the particular beat my partner had chosen to follow.

I hear so often - I don’t like Cuban music, I don’t like jazzy tracks, I don’t like mambo music etc etc..

Personally, I am not prepared to dismiss entire sub genres of salsa music because there is such a huge variety of amazing music out there that I don’t want to limit myself to just one type. In fact I can get bored with clubs that just play the same type of salsa music – I’m definitely a ‘variety is the spice of life’ kind of girl :-).

At the time when I first learnt to dance salsa on 2, footwork/shines were not a big part of general salsa classes. The focus was predominantly on partner work and ‘moves’. In my on 2 classes with the late, great and often misunderstood Special Tee (RIP) that focus was completely reversed – we would literally do hours of footwork with a bit of partner work thrown in at the end.

Now those who dance with me know that I am not a ‘break off for hours and do lots of shines kind of girl! ‘ I much prefer to be swept round the dance floor in the arms of a lovely lead than dance on my own – I could do that in an ordinary night club! However, that footwork discipline meant that my feet now move so automatically and respond so quickly that very little can really phase me from a following point of view. I realise that sounds really cocky but I am going to take a deep breath and leave that sentence in :-).

I notice that many of the less skilled followers (on both 1 and on 2) have lazy feet which makes them slow to react and heavy to lead. So even if you don’t like doing shines on the dancefloor, practising them in class and off the dance floor WILL improve your following skills.

Just the very act of going back to the learning process, focussing on technique and paying attention to what I was doing meant that I did not just learn a new style but I also improved my general dancing ability.

I also got to dance with the most advanced salsa leads in the scene. At that time the natural progression of an advanced on 1 dancer who wanted a new dance challenge was to learn ‘on 2’.

Nowadays with the explosion of popularity of multiple styles of bachata and kizomba many advanced salsa dancers now choose to scratch their learning itch by broadening their experience to other genres rather than deepening their skills within the salsa genre.

So that’s what I got out of learning to dance salsa on 2. What about you?